Go on, take what you need. A perfect mystery, a mouthful of poetry...;O serves up a smorgasbord of the summer's best reads.

By Cathleen Medwick

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

368 pages; Random House

It's 1974, and a man is dancing on a tightrope between the towers of the World Trade Center—risky business, but as Colum McCann reveals in Let the Great World Spin (Random House), so is simply living day to day. This novel, with its web of disparate but connected characters—including a God-battered Irish monk, a swashbuckling prostitute, an artist with a guilty secret, a mother grieving her war dead—is an act of pure bravado, dizzying proof that to keep your balance you need to know how to fall.